“She’s safe,” my friend and fellow resident told me over the phone just hours after reaching his Mom in Kathmandu. A text from my undergraduate Hindi Professor read, “My own family is safe. But it’s hard to comprehend the amount of loss. My own house in which I was born is gone.” Calls, texts, and […]

About 17 years ago, Jeff Taylor, an AIDS advocate, became worried he might have anal cancer. Through his work, Taylor knew that anal cancer rates had risen steeply among people with HIV. He was having discomfort, and he knew that there was a simple screening test: a swab that is processed just like a routine […]

Do you know the difference between a surgeon and God? God doesn’t think he’s a surgeon. Everyone who goes into the study of surgery has ideas about what they’re going to be. I would imagine that each individual has different expectations of what the future holds, though few find their future at all resembles those […]

Here are ten ways that Internet diagnosing interferes with your health care. 1. Dr. Google doesn’t know you. Can’t see you, can’t hear your story, can’t smell you, and can’t touch you. It doesn’t have intuition or gut feelings about you. 2. The Internet breeds cyberchondria in some and false reassurance in others. The more […]

The medical field, more so than many other professional arenas, is continuously struggling to balance the concepts of increasing quality metrics, decreasing overall expenditure, and riding the crest of the current technological and scientific expansion wave. Within the past half century, our profession has borne witness to an explosion of advancement, and with this has come […]

A variety of factors contributes to the challenge. First, even in this era, in which autism is a household word, it is not unusual for me to give the diagnosis to parents who have not considered the possibility that their child has autism. Statistically speaking, the children we see at Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Children’s […]

The recent killing of Walter Scott was another brutal reminder of the home African-Americans wake to daily. Their America, is one where your father might not come home at night, because his brake light went out, and that cost him his life. It’s a place where petty crimes are penalized by life sentences, doled out on the […]

This is important to you. Trust me. If you’re young at heart, it matters because it’s your tax dollars this April. If you’re wiser in years, it directly affects your health and the system you’ve been pumping money into for decades. This is the same medical system that you thought would take care of you later in life. […]

A female patient came to see me with some difficulty swallowing, a very routine issue for a gastroenterologist.  I performed an scope examination of her esophagus and confronted a huge cancer occupying the lower portion of her esophagus. I expected a benign explanation for her swallowing issue.   She was relatively young and not particularly […]

Earnest Tipp was very overdue for his blood pressure follow-up. Almost a year and a half overdue, as a matter of fact. The last few times I had refilled his medications, I had added “needs follow-up” to the signum on his scripts. The other day I finally saw him in my schedule. I thought about […]

I am lucky enough, from time to time, to be invited to speak to young women who want to be surgeons when they “grow up.” I always have a hard time striking a balance between what I should share that is positive and inspirational and what I should share that is a little harsh and […]

If the analogy between medical training and a fraternity is true, then medical students are the pledges. For many, the most grueling part of this pledge process is the third year surgery rotation where the modified Murphy’s Law is applicable almost daily: Anything a medical student can do wrong, a medical student will do wrong. […]

For me, hepatitis B booster shots feel pretty much as pleasant as being sucker punched in the arm. You can imagine that it didn’t inspire much elation when I scrolled through my calendar to see, spelled out in big red letters, a reminder for “Hep B #3.” Now, as I reflect, this reminder feels like a […]

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 46-year-old woman is evaluated before undergoing a dental cleaning procedure involving deep scaling. She has a history of mitral valve prolapse without regurgitation and also had methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) aortic valve endocarditis 10 years ago treated successfully with antibiotics. The […]

I practice gastroenterology in Cleveland in the dark shadow of a large medical institution whose name contains the name of our city.  They are a world class medical institution whose reputation is largely derived from its cardiovascular department.   Presumably, these practitioners, like all doctors, advise patients who smoke that cigarettes have deleterious health effects. […]